Sean’s truck was parked in the driveway behind the pink truck. He’d already brought Rachel over. I swallowed and tried to slow down my breathing as I pressed the doorbell with one shaking finger.

Almost immediately, I heard Adam bouncing inside. He jerked the heavy door open. “What are you doing? You don’t have to ring the doorbell, dork.”

Dumbass! He’d called me a dork loudly enough for the Thompsons to hear three houses over. Talk about romance.

I was about to whisper acidly that he wasn’t doing a very good job of falling head over heels in love. Then I noticed he was wearing his black T-shirt printed in white with a life-size rib cage. Adam looked best in black. The color reflected darkly in the hollows under his high cheekbones, not to mention the bruise under his eye, and made his strange light eyes stand out that much more. The skull and crossbones glimmered at his neck.

He raised his eyebrows, waiting for me to say what I’d opened my mouth to say.

I was speechless. So I grabbed his arm and spun him around at the same time. He was surprised. I managed to pin his arm behind his back for about two seconds before he shook loose and grabbed me.

“Now you’ve asked for it.” He scooped me up, threw me over his shoulder, and held both my wrists in one hand so I couldn’t tickle him. He kicked the door closed and hiked into the living room.

Pausing, he took a few steps toward Sean and Rachel watching TV on the sofa. They sat close together in the dark room. I wouldn’t have been able to tell whose limbs were whose, except Sean didn’t shave his legs. There was a love seat where Adam and I could have settled. Then Adam thought better of it—too close for comfort—and hiked across the room.

“Hello, Sean. Good evening, Rachel,” I called cordially, upside down.

Rachel gave us a half-hearted pipsqueak greeting. Sean shouted at us, “Can you keep it down?”

Hmph! Clearly he was in a jealous rage. Adam and I exchanged a knowing look as he slid me onto the desk in the corner. Still holding my wrists immobile, he fished in a drawer and brought out a long object.

I squinted at it in the dark. “Not the stapler!” I cried.

He grinned, tossed the stapler beside me, and rummaged in the drawer again.

“Please,” I gasped, “not the Liquid Paper!”

“Shut up!” Sean shouted.

Adam and I widened our eyes at each other like we were offended and hurt. I shook my wrists out of his grasp and reached behind me for a red Sharpie out of the pencil cup. Smoothing my hand across his chest (shiver), I made a red mark across the bottom right rib printed on his T-shirt, the rib I knew he’d broken. Or was it my other right? “What ribs have you broken?”

He looked down at his shirt. “This one,” he said, pointing.

I made a red mark across that rib. “What else?”

“Mm.” He stretched his shirt out at the bottom so he could see it better, and pointed to the opposite side. “These two.” He watched as I made neat red marks across those ribs. His chin was close to my cheek.

“Both of you act crazy,” Sean said smoothly, “like you’re off your medication. Or like you’re going to a shrink.”

I didn’t look at Adam. I didn’t think I looked at Sean, either. But I had an impression later of Sean’s face glowing white and then blue in the light of TV, and Rachel in the shadows beside him. I thought the medication comment was meant for Adam. I knew the shrink comment was meant for me.

I capped the marker and stuck it back in the pencil cup. “I’ll see you later,” I whispered, sliding around Adam and hopping down from the desk. I had to get across the room and outside without being further humiliated, which meant I must not fall down in my high heels. Or cry. I even closed the front door behind me without making any noise.

And then Adam burst through it and slammed it behind him, shaking the house. “Lori!”

“Shhh,” I said with my finger to my lips, backing off the porch and into the wet grass. I didn’t want to shout about what Sean had said. It was bad enough when we were quiet about it.

Adam collected himself as I watched, taking a deep breath through his nose, with his eyes closed. Then he opened his eyes and said, “The five-minute date does nothing to make them jealous.” He formed his first finger and thumb into a circle. “Zero.”

I swallowed. “I can’t.”

He stepped closer to me. “Sean has a way of finding that one thing that will make you feel so good about yourself, or so bad about yourself. That’s why you love him. That’s why I hate him. You knew this when you went fishing.”

I was too discombobulated to make a joke about my lures. I just wanted to get away from their house. “I’ve had enough of boys for today, I think.”

He frowned. “Are you sure?” He rubbed my arm. My hair stood on end.

Shivering in the warm night, I put my arm down by my side, where he couldn’t reach it. “Too much of a good thing. It’s strange, but even cheese fries can get tiresome.”

“I’ll walk you home, then.”

“No,” I said, “I’m sorry. I’m just done.”

He watched me carefully for a moment, lowering his head to look into my eyes. “Okay. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Bye.”

He walked back into the house and closed the door softly.

I stared at the door knocker, tree frogs screaming all around me. I had done the wrong thing. I wanted to be in the house with him. And Sean.

Sean had said something like that to me only once before, just a good-natured joke as we passed each other in the hall at school. I’d started to cry. The office had called my dad (again). Dad and McGillicuddy and I had had a Big Talk about it that night, wherein I told my dad that my business was not his to tell Sean’s parents about, and wherein McGillicuddy promised to have a discussion with Sean about keeping his mouth shut. Apparently he had, because Sean never said a word to me about it again. And if he told the whole school, they were very discreet and didn’t let on to me that they knew. Which would have been out of character for them, because they were bitches.

That first time happened not long after I went to the shrink, so Sean probably was just experimenting to see what I’d do. This time, he must have mentioned it because he was trying to hurt me. And if he’d tried to hurt me, he was in love with me and jealous of Adam. I knew this because when he wasn’t in love with me and jealous of Adam, he ignored me and was quite pleasant to me.

Therefore, the plan must be working! Hooray! So I should go back in there, flirt with Adam, and press the issue.

As I stood there, considering whether to ring the doorbell or just walk on inside like I owned the place, or like they’d installed a dog door, I heard Adam holler, “Thanks, Sean.”

“No problem,” Sean said more quietly, because he was too courteous to yell in Rachel’s ear.

I felt a flash of panic. They weren’t being sarcastic. Adam was genuinely thanking Sean for getting him out of spending an evening with me. This was called a negative self-concept. I had learned about it in health class (tenth grade). Having a negative self-concept made me think people were making fun of me, on top of the times when they really were making fun of me, which I seemed to miss completely.

Then footsteps pounded up the stairs inside. Adam’s bedroom light flicked on. He put his hands on the window-sill and pressed his forehead to the glass, looking for me, but he couldn’t see out because of the glare.

Adam wouldn’t double-cross me.

Would he?

Friday I had gas. This was fine with me. I spent most of the morning by myself on the dock, soaking up rays and feeling mentally diseased.

I didn’t think I could stand a lunch hour in the office, eating Mrs. Vader’s chicken salad sandwich, on edge, expecting Sean to sneak in or Adam to burst in or both. I told Mrs. Vader I was treating myself to a nice lunch out.

“Oh,” she said, nodding. “Something happened between ‘you and Adam’?” She moved her fingers in quotation marks.

Yeah, I didn’t have the energy to argue with her this time. That was Adam’s problem. I walked over to my family’s dock and launched the canoe.

The open water was choppy with wind and wakes from passing speedboats. I didn’t get T-boned. It was a little early for anyone to be drunk.

The wind blew me off course. I reached the far bank and needed to backtrack along the shore to the Harbargers’ house. Here in the shallows, protected by overhanging trees, the water was clear and calm. Miniature whirlpools stirred around my oar. I dragged my hand in the warm water, and minnows nibbled my fingers.

I docked at the Harbargers’ and ran up to the house. It was such a relief to feel the grass on my bare feet! Every toe had a blister from a different pair of high-heeled sandals. I slid open the glass door and stepped into the den.

Frances and the kids looked up. They were sitting on the floor around the coffee table. Frances didn’t sit on furniture if there was a floor available. A copy of Mother Earth News lay open in front of her. She had stuck lengths of uncooked spaghetti into balls of Play-Doh. The kidlets were busy sliding Froot Loops onto the spaghetti, sorting by color. I couldn’t believe they’d fallen for that old trick. Frances could convince children anything was a game, for about five minutes. Obviously some children were more gullible than others.

I walked into the kitchen and looked in the refrigerator. No surprises there. The meat loaf was made with tofu. Frances’s strong points as a nanny included a master’s degree in early childhood education and a PhD in Russian literature, but nothing approaching cooking skills, unless it was some weird hippie experiment like drying fruit on the roof. Mmmmm, rubbery apricots with a hint of tar. I filled a bowl with Froot Loops, poured soy milk over them, and joined the powwow on the floor.

Between bites I asked, “What did you mean when you said mine wasn’t the only plot?”

Without looking up from the magazine on the coffee table, Frances said, “I told you. I don’t know.”

“What would be the metaphorical firecracker in the metaphorical homemade cheese?”

She shrugged.

“Like, Sean dared Adam to hook up with me because I’m so oafish and dog-looking?”

“You are not dog-looking,” Frances said sternly. “Besides, a plot like that would involve a high level of organization. They would have to think it through carefully. None of you do that. Except Bill, of course, who thinks things through so carefully that he can’t take action. Like his father.”

My spoon stopped in my mouth at the mention of my dad, who’d been the farthest person from my mind. I swallowed and shouted, “Then what the hell kind of plot are you talking about?”

Frances didn’t even react when I cussed in front of her charges. She reasoned that making a big deal out of curse words drew attention to them and caused children to use them more. So she ignored them. I’m not sure this ploy worked, but then, she’d had an uphill battle with McGillicuddy and me. We lived next door to Mr. Vader, who could have written a dictionary of filth. She asked, calm as ever, “Have you thought Adam might really like you?”

The hair on my arms stood up, just as if Adam were sitting behind me with his hand on my shoulder.

“No, I haven’t.” That would be seven kinds of awful, if Adam had agreed to pretend to get together with me because he really wanted to get together with me. My ploy to get Sean would be ruined. I might finally land Sean, like in my dreams. But knowing I’d broken Adam’s heart would be a downer and a distraction. Like making out in the movie theater, knowing the pink truck in the parking lot was on fire. My mother wanted me to be with Sean, but didn’t she want me to be happy?

Frances turned the page. “Open your eyes. And watch out for those boys.”

12

Wakeboarding that afternoon, I watched the boys until my eyeballs hurt from the sun glinting off the water. I could have sworn there was nothing to watch out for. Sean was a little warmer to me than usual—the way he always acted after he’d insulted me, like some friendliness here could make up for a lack of friendliness elsewhere.

Adam was very warm to me. While Sean drove, my brother wakeboarded, and Cameron spotted, Adam pulled me into his lap in the bow. He set his chin on my shoulder and rubbed his hands up and down my thighs. The best part of this, for the purpose of making Sean’s blood boil, was that Adam did it without comment, without expecting me to comment, as if it were the most natural thing in the world for him to act like my boyfriend.

The worst part of this, for the purpose of watching out for those boys, was that if my eyelids had been duct-taped open to my eyebrows, I still wouldn’t have been able to tell whether Adam liked me, or pretended to like me, or liked me but pretended he was only pretending.

The five of us pitched the wakeboards and life vests from the boat back into the warehouse. The Friday night party would start soon, so Sean, Cameron, and my brother headed for the houses. I ought to have been right behind them. I needed plenty of time to shower and primp and change clothes twenty times like girls were supposed to do before parties.

But I took Adam’s hand and held him back from the others. I whispered what had been bugging me all day. “Frances thinks you have a plot, other than the plot with me to make Sean and Rachel jealous.”

His eyes flew wide open, and the rest of him seemed to shrink back a bit. Then he stood up straighter, and his brow went down. “Frances? I haven’t spoken to Frances in years. Plus she’s creepy.”

“Only because she’s always right,” I said. “And last night, something you said to Sean… Do you have a plot against me? Are you double-crossing me? He dared you to go out with the dog next door, and if you did, he’d give you your cute little girlfriend back?”

Tags: Jennifer Echols The Boys Next Door
Source: readsnovelonline.net